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I dont know that seems strange that your not getting skill ups. I know for me I just play my guy in my groups or whatever and they just go up. I know with melee skill ups you cant level up on grey con mobs. I dont know about bards. I find that it goes faster if i just casually use them in a box or group situations and they go up faster.

Do the lowest level songs. They go faster than higher level as your less likely to fizzle a low level one and thus not get a skill up. It's just like spells, don't use high level spells to skill up on unless your main isn't to skill up but to make use of the spells. Even then, some lower level spells tend to better, like the Ensnare snare isn't often resisted and lasts 15 mins. The only benefit of the higher level ones is less chance of being resisted, but at much higher mana cost and shorter duration.

I don't know which is true, but I've heard both of sticking to one song the entire skill up time, and using a melody. Personally I got with one song. You get a chance for a skill up every tick. And once it's playing it won't fizzle, and will only stop on an interruption or a missed note (unusual if not doing anything else).

Yther Ore.

Edited, Apr 12th 2014 6:11am by Yther

Thanks for the offer, but although the char will likely be on, I won't be watching. Maybe another time!!!!!

I often wished they had implemented a few quests, set at points past the content. So for example you would go to Thurgadin for the quest that set your skills at level 50 cap, Plane of Justice quest put you at level 60 skill caps, (there was a bit of a level squish capwise for a few expacs so I would skip ahead maybe) DoN for 65, TSS for 70 and so on.

The quests could be framed in the "summary of the lore of the content you are probably skipping" type context and be built around some travel and npc interaction rather than killing X mobs X times.


Even better would be questlines for specific skills (i.e., you go to frogloks or Iksars for swimming skill up quest) but I'm realistic that they would not write several 100 quests to accomplish this. ...although, I wonder how hard it would be to retrofit rewarding skill ups onto a bunch of old quests, things like the stein quests nearly ever caster used to do.

Skills maxed as of 1AM this morning. Rough estimate was 162 hours of doing nothing but leaving the char playing instruments all day long for 10 straight days......

~
My trick was to get skills maxxed, and then never let them get more than two levels (10 pts) below cap. Making up a deficit of more than that was just painful -- wasn't a jolly good ol'time getting 10 but at least it was typically within reason. Except for the odd skill -- some levels it seemed like Div would never max, others Abjuration.

Am I mistaken, but at one point, weren't we able to get skills 5 points above cap? Like, the formula was lvl*5 + 5? So, say a lvl 10 is working on some skill, the cap at lvl 10 would be 10 * 5 = 50 + 5 = 55 as skill cap for that skill at that level.

I agree here... work on skills every 2-3 levels.. This keeps your skills closer to max. With AA's its easy to turn AA exp on and work on skills without leveling. Also for spells I have found that lower level spells skill up faster then trying high level.

The formula you posted there was for Melee weapons/defense/offense skills. I think at low levels this still occurs but not so sure at high levels.

Bards level their music skills of their INT scores. Back when I played a bard, I never had that much trouble leveling my skills -- the most obnoxious was brass because you got a brass song so late and it was opponent targeted so I'd wind up having to harass moss snakes and crap to skill it up. But everything else I leveled either during the course of natural game play or idling for much shorter periods than you describe.

I don't doubt your experience but I don't have an answer for it either; that seems very out of bounds.

Yep.. something wasn't being done right. I power lvl'd a bard to 75 without him every playing a note. At 75 I set him up with the lvl 1 songs and left him over night. The next morning all skills were maxxed... less than 12 hours.

Just FYI, I don't think that a healer merc on "passive" will do any healing at all. My understanding is that a merc on the passive stance does nothing but follow you around. It can be buffed, but will not cost you money to keep and will not actually do anything for you. The only reason to put a merc in passive is for going afk in the GL for buffs (so as to not cost you money), or as an alternative to suspending the merc. You can't unsuspend a merc in combat, but you can change it's stance, so when wandering around in potentially dangerous places but not settled and actively using the merc, setting it to passive is a better way to go. If you actually need the healer merc to heal you, but don't want it to overheal and run out of mana, you should probably set it on "efficient".


Depending on class, it's not terribly hard to just level up combat skills directly (ie: against mobs). There's a slowdown point around 200 or so, but other than that you can just equip any weapon skill you suck at and fight lt blue mobs like you might normally do. I got on a combat skills kick with my paladin last weekend and raised all of my weapon skills to max in about 30 minutes fighting "normal" mobs. To be fair, about half of them were just a few points shy of max, but I had one that was about 50 points down, and another (1hb, cause there's a dearth of good 1hb weapons for paladins in my level range) that was about 100 points down. Then, for kicks, I decided to work up fist attack. That skill zipped up to around 100 (like going up 20 points per kill), then slowed down dramatically for the next hundred points or so. By around 200, I got bored and logged out. Not sure how long in total it would take, but given that I was still gaining exp (lots slower than normal though, since I was killing mobs I usually swarm, but just one or two at a time) it wasn't that big of a deal. Got enough procs and swing based stuff that it really didn't matter that the actual weapon damage was terrible.


I do this with my wizard too. Depending on what I'm fighting, it's not uncommon for me to just stand in melee range and whack the mob with whatever random weapon I feel like. Course, my wiz has far fewer weapon skills to work up, so there is that.

Edited, May 2nd 2014 4:35pm by gbaji